An ever-increasing number of products and services are being sold or marketed over the World Wide Web and other online channels. For example, marketers such as retailers may provide a website where customers can learn about and purchase the marketer's own products and services. In addition, websites, social media, and other online channels are being used to market these goods and services through third-party sites maintained by a party other than the marketer itself. The third-party website owners may receive income from advertising revenue paid by the marketer, either directly or indirectly, with the revenue received by the third-party website owner being based in part upon the traffic it receives through “impressions” delivered to users viewing its website and/or “click throughs” by users who actually click on an advertisement. Regardless of whether the owner of the website is a marketer itself or a third party providing advertising space or services for the marketer, the website owner may benefit from gathering useful and accurate information about the website's visitors. Desirable information about the website visitor would include data that indicates or tends to indicate whether the visitor is more likely to actually purchase the goods and services offered by the marketer.
Although gathering additional information about website visitors would be of significant value to the website owner and the marketer, the protection of the privacy of website visitors must remain a critical concern. Any website visitor information gathered or discerned must comply with privacy laws, regulations, and industry best practices. In particular, the use of personal identifying information (PII) concerning these website visitors—such as name, address, telephone number, and email address information—is often restricted in online transactions throughout many jurisdictions in order to protect user privacy. Thus any attempt to better understand consumer behavior in an online, multi-channel marketing environment must ensure that the PII of the website visitor is not used in any manner that would compromise the privacy of the website visitor.
Because of the limitations on the use of PII in online marketing due to privacy concerns, most attempts to gather information about website visitors are limited to “clickstream” data, that is, information about which websites a particular visitor has previously visited during web browsing sessions. This information may, for example, be discerned from cookies stored in the website visitor's web browser. This information itself does not contain any PII, and thus its use does not raise the same privacy concerns that may be raised if this clickstream data were combined with name, address, or similar information by the marketer. But the utility of this information is quite limited for the website owner. Attempts to infer a website visitor's intentions, behavioral attributes, demographics, or buying propensities based simply on websites previously visited by that website visitor often result in errors. Thus a method for more accurately determining important traits of the website visitor as a potential customer, while also maintaining the privacy for the website visitor by avoiding the exposure of the website visitor's PII to the marketer or third-party website owner, would be highly desirable.